Prologue of an exciting tour

Prologue of an exciting tour

As a 3rd or 4th year student Chemical Technology you’ll be the key assistant to an experienced business entrepreneur who is starting a new activity: engineering & supply of drying equipment for the chemical and food industry.

By joining a number of common lecture and discussion sessions you will supports us with the applicable basic theory to enable the design program being made by us. During discussions you will have lots of opportunities to transfer your theoretical knowledge and to combine it with our technical and practical know-how.

Later this year we will have some pilot installations at our disposal (a Fluidized Bed and a Paddle drier). These will operate on different applications at production facilities on site of potential customers. All data collected by these pilot installations are used for dimensioning of full scale drying equipment. You will assist us by translating test data input and analyses into practical design tools.

It will be even more exiting if you are interested to continue your engagement after the theoretical stage by being our side kick in the coming future. However, this is not a limiting condition of course.

Who are we looking for?

As mentioned above, preferably a 3rd or 4th year student Chemical Technology (male or female) with the right spirit and dedicated theoretical interest (or the drive to gain more practical knowledge) on particularly heat & mass transfer, constant & falling rate drying and fluidization phenomena and the will to transfer this theory into applicable formula to enable us to optimize and extend our design program.

Rather doing this tandem wise?

We talked about a student. However if you prefer doing the job in cooperation with one of your student friend, no problem; it’s all discussible.

Samples of problem definition

Certain mass of a product with known physical properties like, particle size distribution, moisture content etc. is being fluidized with hot air:
1) what will be the wet bulb temperature of the air?
3) how long will the constant rate drying phase be?
4) same question for the expected falling rate drying phase?
5) what will be the average product temperature at the end of falling rate drying?
6) what will be the average pressure drop related to the product layer depth and air load?

source: Wikipedia.org

Suggested procedure
We will have an introduction interview as a 1st step. We can do this at the TU or in any other low profile location in the vicinity of Delft. It can be done on normal working days, but also on Saturdays is an option. Morning, afternoon or evening, as you want it.

During the interview we sense our common feeling of interest and expectations; let’s say if we catch on with each other. We will then agree on the financial aspects. Finally we plan a 1st session, the location and the topics of that session.

Currently we suggest that it will be a number of sessions with a white board, a laptop etc.
We expect that it must be feasible to deal with this issues during a number of sessions of approx. 2 – 3 hours each within a period of 6 – 8 weeks. However this can only be predicted more accurate after some sessions of course.